Zoning reform, human-scale design, and planning for people
Excerpts from a conversation I had with Coby Lefkowitz, one of the participants in my documentary about the connections between public health & the built environment.
The audio clips are excerpts from a conversation I had with
. He’s an urbanist, developer, writer, and optimist. Checking all those boxes, naturally I wanted to be sure to include him in the under-production documentary about healthy infrastructure.I’ve transcribed some of Coby’s thoughts for those who prefer reading.
Does zoning lead to a lousy built environment?
On its own, I don't believe zoning leads to a lousy build environment. I think the way that we've constructed it has. All that zoning does is permit or prohibit land uses and intensities. You could have a very prescriptive zoning program that says we’re only going to have three layers of zones, each one more permissive than the last.
Zoning could be a base of residential everywhere with some commercial layered in. On the next tier up, more heavy commercial and larger residential densities. And then the highest could be industrial uses that aren't going to go into the other layers. This is pretty much the way Japanese zoning works.
They still have regulations, but I think one would be hard pressed to say that Japan doesn't have some very desirable cities or built environments and they still have very strong zoning codes. So it's not that the [American] zoning is bad inherently, but there are a lot of regulations that can be layered on top of it that make it worse.
Take building regulations. They say you need to set back buildings 25 feet from the street on either side so the right-of-ways are 50 feet across. And then really intense zone regulations say you can only have chain stores here, you can only have single-family residential here, and you can only have office parks there.
There is a spectrum of zoning. Unfortunately, in the US, it's been very prescriptive such that people think that it’s entirely to blame for our problems. And I think they're is a little bit of nuance that this conversation demands. Zoning historically has been so niche. We have to have those more in-depth conversations.
How did North America get into this situation where our surroundings aren’t suited for human flourishing?
There is historically a belief in institutions in America, and it's one of our greatest strengths. And there’s a belief that if a law exists, there has to be some reason why it's created. Before this large surge in skepticism over police departments or Congress or even municipalities, there was less of a question because we generally had good outcomes.
We had good schools, good roads, infrastructure that wasn't falling apart, so there was less of a reason to question laws. Now there’s some curiosity over why we have certain outcomes.
Why is it that we have to drive 30 minutes to get to soccer practice, or to get to work?
Why is it that we can only have a single-family home here and I can’t walk to the coffee shop?
Why is it illegal to build more than three stories in certain places?
I think that intellectual curiosity is increasing. People are reconciling what might work in theory versus what works in practice. There's been an over-reliance on things that theoretically should work.
It might seem like we should be developing capital for affordable housing subsidized by the state, that it should be the state's role. But in practice it might not work as well as the theory. You might not have management capabilities to oversee a large and vast system of public and affordable housing. We might not have the funding or the expertise, and this runs up against our belief in institutions that are now cracking and wearing thin. What's important about creating places is that theory doesn't drive practice, it's kind of the other way around.
There are a lot of urban planners, designers, and architects who come from an observational school of designs. William Holly Whyte, Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, and other important figures have said we should design places around what people want and not what we think they should need.
So we think that people like living in these pods and clusters of only single-family homes, but when there are less zoning regulations, how do people actually live? If we go to informal settlements and cities that grew organically, how did those places develop? That is more of a “practice leading theory” versus the other way around.
So I think if you want to create better and more people communities, we should not look at those places that are top-down imposed, highly theoretical, and highly planned. You should go to those places that were developed by and for people and these tend to be older, medieval cities. Some people might use “medieval” as a pejorative among planners, but I’m using the term as a wonderful thing similar to ancient cities, African cities, Middle Eastern cities.
There is a temporal clash between people in planning and architectural schools where contemporary or modern architects push back against anything that is old. And there’s the over-romanticized view among traditional designers that everything old is good and what is new is bad. It just seems to be that a lot of places that we love tend to be older because they were more organic, and they were built out of practice and out of utility, and out of marrying a pride in the beauty of the built environment. And a lot of places that we’ve lived in for the last 80 years as a result of modernist philosophy have been from a theoretical view, less about humanity and creating humane spaces and more about fitting people into theories of “good” places.
So if you look at Le Corbusier and these modern philosophies of planning, the car was predominant and still is today in many ways. And now we're challenging that approach. It doesn't mean that cars are bad and that walking is always good, and that these two can't coexist. What modern or contemporary planners and architects got wrong is that they adored or valued theory above practice and above how people actually live.
A quarter of the way into the 21st century, sprawl and sameness surrounds us. Is it possible to create beautiful places?
The answer is a resounding yes. We absolutely can create lovely, beautiful, desirable, magical, dream-worthy places in North America. And that's not just blind hope, that's looking at what we’ve done over the last 40 years.
There's been a paradigm shift. Slowly, very incrementally at first, and now it's snowballing into an avalanche today where there are hundreds of thousands of terrific new places that have been built.
They might be isolated pockets where they're not popularly seen. You might not be reading about them in the leading architectural presses or leading magazines or newspapers of our day, but they're absolutely happening. I think it's only a matter of time before it breaks through into the mainstream.
What I don't see a lot of people talking about is this: taking those regulations that are nonsensical and applying them to our everyday lives such that it is more common sense. For instance, driving 30 minutes to go to the park or to Walmart doesn't make much sense. The most desirable neighborhoods of North America are incredibly expensive because they have good urban bones. They have very common-sense planning, and they're also really beautiful and lovely.
These aren't places that simply have narrow roads, or simply have no setbacks, or simply have limited parking regulations. The ornamentation of the buildings may be simple and be highly complex, but it is fundamentally attractive. The proportions are at a human scale. There's a mixing of uses that creates dynamism that people are attracted to and want to be part of. We’re re-learning those lessons after 80s years or so.
I am incredibly optimistic, not just because we have historic places that we can draw on as precedent, but also because we see it today. There are no cultural differences between North Americans and Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, Africans who have these great built environments. There's no reason why someone lives in Kansas or Nebraska or Washington wouldn't want to live in a walkable community. They've just been prohibited from doing that.
Humans are the same, whether you live in Nairobi or Bangladesh or Bhutan or Omaha. We are all fundamentally the same. There are no cultural differences that limit the types of places to build. That's a thing to be thankful for. There’s no cultural limitation to making great places. We’ve done it before. We're currently doing it again. And I think in the future, we’ll do a lot more it.
I’ve got lots more interview segments on the way. In the meantime, be sure you subscribe to Coby’s substack,
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